Archives for December 2012

★★★★ 4 stars Told through the eyes of a Punjabi Sikh family and set in Singapore between the 1970s and the 1990s, this bold debut tells the intersecting stories of a family and a nation—both struggling to survive the onslaught of change. Narain’s father is sending him to America in the hope that studying engineering […]

★★★★ 4 stars ‘I was the binge-drinking health reporter. During the week, I wrote about Australia’s booze-soaked culture. At the weekends, I wrote myself off.’ A senior journalist with the Sunday Age, Scottish-born Jill Stark had won awards for her drug- and alcohol-related health reporting. She had also been a binge drinker since she was […]

The book opens in February 2009 with the 33 year-old author recalling the moment of the attack and then in a kind of cliff hanger for the reader, immediately flashes back to the author’s childhood in the form of a countdown starting with Day Minus 6500 leading up to the day of the attack (Day […]

What makes us who we are: our name, food, language, religion? Social researcher/author Rebecca Huntley wanted to find out and the result is her gentle, deeply personal story about love, loss, family history and a crisis of identity. Huntley writes: “I always say ‘I’m Italian’, but it doesn’t feel true. I’m an imposter, […]

“Flamenco took me out of that narrow world where success was equated with the value of your handbag on eBay, your boyfriend’s taxable income and how close you were to buying that waterfront property … With flamenco I was transported into a world where everyone is beautiful, because beauty is in everything … […]